Friday, December 7

I had a bit of a dilemma with this category as I had to decide whether I took into account the weather conditions. Did I assess according to what I would expect in a 'normal' year or what I had expected after experiencing the conditions this year? In the end I decided to sort of use a bit of both sets of criteria.

Then I made my list and it was quite long so in order not to bore you with an extremely long post I'm dividing into two posts - one for vegetables and one for fruit.

I'll start with the vegetables - and those fruits that we always consider to be a vegetable like courgettes.

Courgettes actually surprised us as we didn't expect them to do very well in the prevailing conditions especially after some of the plants didn't respond well to being planted out. As it turned out all three varieties planted produced a good crop. Maybe they weren't quite as prolific as in a 'normal' year but that was no bad thing. Can you spot the odd one out in the photo? Well two odd ones out actually. A summary of how the varieties fared is here.

The other fruit come vegetable crop in this category are tomatoes. The varieties varied in performance. A comparison summary is here. I have made a bit of an allowance for the weather and the tomatoes were very slow to ripen but in the end things weren't too bad and we had enough to freeze some and make some chutney and pasta sauces.

Although the first lot of broad beans didn't really thrive - the conditions were poor when they were planted - subsequent planting made up for this with the later planted purple flowered variety cropping well and providing plenty of beans for freezing.

We didn't really expect the French beans to 'like' the conditions that they had to tolerate but in the end they too did as well as could be expected and produced a steady supply of beans with enough to freeze some too. We grew green, yellow and purple varieties which all seemed to crop at a similar level.

The garlic that was planted directly in the ground and that planted in tubs in the greenhouse and moved out later in early spring out-performed that started off in pots and produced more than enough to meet out needs - far more than enough. A summary can be found here. We won't be growing any in pots next year. To rely on that planted direct though could be a mistake with such wet, soggy conditions and so we are also growing garlic in tubs.

Beetroot has also provided us with a good crop. This year we sowed all of this directly into the ground and didn't thin the seedlings at all. This produced a good supply of small to medium roots which were just right.

Radishes have grown as radishes do with little help from us - we just have to remember to pull them rather than letting them grow to turnip size.

As for lettuces it depended when they were in the ground - the weather spoiled some - probably more than usual but on the whole they performed as expected.

I'm being a bit presumptive as far as the last two vegetables in this category go.We've only just started to harvest the parsnips but so far so good.

As for the sprouts we haven't picked any yet but the main thing is sprouts have developed which is more than could be said in the past before we started to grow Crispus, a club root resistant variety. I hope that these prove to deserve their entry into this category. As we haven't picked any yet I'm including a photo of the sprouts harvested in January as they deserve a mention having carried over into 2012.

We were also harvesting more sprouts and some of the overwintering leeks and parsnips last year in February.

I spotted the imposters, cucumbers in with the courgettes. I really wasn't expecting much from the tomatoes this year after they were so stubborn and refused to ripen. I wasn't as patient as you though and just about my whole harvest was ripened on the windowsill. They came good in the end though, which is all that matters. I didn't know that tomatoes can be frozen, how will you use them? Your parsnips are looking good. I'm hoping for great things from my three.

The ones we are digging now were sown on 30 April, Liz which was a bit later than usual due to the weather. We dug our last lot of the ones sown in 2011 on 11 March. They are basically in the ground 12 months but you could dig them up now and store them.

Certainly a great harvest...probably not as good as other years but still you had fresh food on the table and that's why we put in all this hard work.Maybe one year no matter what the weather I will still get such a great harvest too!!

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